Continuity mistake: When Barbarella first has to go down for an emergency crash landing, she puts her right arm up to her head in panic. However in the next shot it is her left arm that is up to her head instead of her right. (00:12:35)
Barbarella (1968)
Directed by: Roger Vadim
Starring: Jane Fonda, John Phillip Law, Anita Pallenberg, Milo O'Shea
Other mistake: In the scene after Barbarella is taken out of the orgasm machine, she is given a new costume, and she no longer has her tongue box - yet everyone still speaks English.
Revealing mistake: When Barabarella and Pygar are being attacked by the leather guards in the labyrinth, Barbarella tells Pygar to shoot to the right. Pygar, howver, swivels left and shoots, hitting the guard dead on. Since Pygar is blind, he had only her instructions to go on. (00:37:35)
Trivia: Sophia Loren turned down the title role.
Pygar: An angel does not make love, an angel is love.
Durand-Durand: Come on, come on! Stop stalling.
Barbarella: I'm trying to find the keyhole.
Barbarella: Listen you kids, untie me or I'll call your parents.
Question: Serious spoiler alert, but this has always puzzled me. At the end of Barbarella the Black Queen unleashes "Matmos", an evil energy which destroys nearly everybody and everything in the film. Pygar (the blind angel) escapes, only rescuing two people from the cataclysm: Barbarella and the Black Queen. Barbarella asks Pygar why he saved the Black Queen after all the evil things she did (she even blinded Pygar). Pygar replies "an angel has no memory." I never got the point of that. What did Pygar mean? (In his previous conversation he recalled things that happened before he was blinded, so obviously he did have a memory.) And I could not see the point of or meaning to this ending at all. Did any of this make sense to anybody else?
Answer: You say that Barbarella was beyond lame-it was totally atrociously bad and ludicrous. It was released in autumn 1968, when I was 12, and too young to see it at the cinema. I finally got to see Barbarella when I was 18 and it was shown late one night on television. I wholly concur: I thought it was totally, atrociously bad and ludicrous, and my opinion has not changed since.
Answer: I concede your point. Perhaps I was being a bit too literal. When Pygar says he has no memory, he may not mean that all past events clear from his mind (in the way that, for example, you could delete a computer file from your laptop). Instead, he might mean he does not dwell on the past, or he does not retain bitterness or anger for past wrongs, or he does not return evil on those who were bad to him. I think the film was based on a comic that ended in pretty much the same way. All the same, I always thought the ending was rather lame. It was as if somebody told Roger Vadim (the director) "hey, this film is supposed to be 90 minutes long, but we've done 89 minutes filming, and we still haven't got an ending." So Roger Vadim got the Black Queen to unleash Matmos and destroy everything. (To be pedantic, Barbarella is 98 minutes long, but I hope you understand what I mean.) Personally I thought the ending of "Monty Python And The Holy Grail", where a police force stops the film, was a similar disappointment.
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Answer: I don't think his comment is meant to be taken literally. To him, a person's past behavior has no relevance to that particular moment in time (in that the memory of it has been selectively voided in the angel's mind), and therefore it does not affect who he saves.
raywest ★